Lundarektorerna

This week Per is in Taiwan and yesterday he visited the Ministry of Education in Taipei. Per told Minister for Education Wei-Ling Chiang about LU’s innovation climate and the Swedish law on intellectual property rights of academic staff. This interested the minister so much that he invited himself, his family and a delegation of vice-chancellors to visit us in Sweden – probably as early as the autumn!

Energy is a hot topic in Taiwan and discussions are currently underway on the possible construction of a fourth nuclear power station. The minister also said that Taiwan is following developments in nanotechnology, biotechnology and IT closely.

During the day visits were also made to semiconductor company TSMC and LED manufacturer Epistar, which both have their origins in the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). The companies are based at Hsinchu Science Park, which is generally regarded as Taiwan’s equivalent of Silicon Valley. The science park is adjacent to two of Taiwan’s leading universities, NCTU and NTHU, and the technology companies it is home to employ over 100 000 people.

This week Per is visiting Taiwan with a delegation of LU researchers. The purpose of the visit is to increase collaboration and exchange with the Republic in both education and research. The invitation for the trip came from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education and the delegation includes Lars Samuelson (nanotechnology), Per Tunestål (combustion engineering) and Anders Robertsson (automatic control).

On the programme are visits to some of Taiwan’s leading universities, including the National Taiwan University, National Chiao Tung University and National Tsing Hua University. Visits will also be made to the world’s largest semiconductor company TSMC and Taiwan’s leading LED manufacturer Epistar.

Lund University already has collaborations with institutions and companies in Taiwan, but the plan is to develop these further – partly as a complement to the collaboration that LU currently has on the mainland with the People’s Republic of China. Today an idea came up for leading universities here to arrange a day in which a larger group from Lund University would be given the opportunity to present research and education and discuss possible future collaboration. We will be considering this idea over the coming days.

Here is a message from Per in Taiwan (in Swedish):

Last week a meeting was held of vice-rector’s for teaching and learning within LERU (League of European Research Intensive Universities). It was a very inspiring meeting. A clear ambition was expressed from Europe’s research-intensive universities to tackle the rapid development that is now taking place in education together – the way we educate, the demands and expectations of teachers, students and society, etc. – not least in terms of quality assurance of any involvement in online open access courses, or MOOCs. A ‘position paper’ will be drawn up.

At LU we need to sustain the continual process of improving the quality of education. EQ11 gave us good experience and the discussions that have taken place since, as well as international developments, have shown that we have a good chance of staying ahead if we coordinate the University’s vast resources in teaching and learning: the Humanities Laboratory, the subjects of education science and education, teacher training, etc.

Ahead of the next meeting of the Education Board, Student Affairs is to present a proposal for an inquiry into the University’s handling of e-learning, OER, distance learning and the digital tools that are used in education. In addition, I have assigned Head of CED Åsa Lindberg-Sand to coordinate the forthcoming work on inventories and brainstorming to develop a proposal for possible MOOCs at LU. The idea is to put together a coherent document with a scientific foundation that takes advantage of the skills across the University.

/Eva

Last week I visited the University of Nottingham with staff from the faculties of Law, Science, Engineering (LTH), Social Sciences and Humanities and Theology. Nottingham University also visited Lund in the autumn and came very well prepared. They knew which fields of research and education were of most interest to them and met representatives of the faculties mentioned, as well as the Faculty of Medicine.

Anne Messeter from External Relations, Dr Richard Masterman, who heads the work on internationalisation in Nottingham, and Katja Durkin, Anne’s counterpart in Nottingham

During the visit, Nottingham Vice-Chancellor Professor David Greenaway and I signed a Memorandum of Understanding. David Greenaway is a frequent guest at Lund’s School of Economics and Management and he said how pleased he was that we were visiting his university. Nottingham is a member of the U21 network and is therefore an important partner for us. They now want to deepen and expand the collaboration we have.

Topics of discussion during the visit were research collaborations, student exchanges, joint Master’s and PhD programmes, conferences, etc. Nottingham also has campuses in Ningbo, China, and in Malaysia, where there are activities of interest to us.

Representatives of cancer research at the Faculty of Medicine will be visiting Nottingham later in February.

It is so rewarding to travel with representatives of different operations at our university. We will have to see what collaborations are reinforced or initiated in law, biology, chemistry, building technology and sustainable construction, food technology, political science, education, archaeology and medicine. I also had the opportunity to discuss research on bilingualism and second language learning, especially of English, with representatives of linguistics and psychology. Nottingham are very interested in our Humanities Laboratory, as we saw when they visited us in October.

The visit was reported in the Nottingham Post, as were our plans for collaboration.

In addition, the delegation visited the University of Birmingham. This visit took place on the way back to Lund. Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education Karen O’Brien welcomed us together with Professor Jeff Bale. We discussed basically the same questions as in Nottingham. My focus was on the teacher training programme and the possibility of exchanges for our students. This is particularly relevant as the University of Birmingham is starting a secondary school and sixth form on its campus.

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On Friday, the management of Aarhus University visited us. We exchanged experiences and discussed possible further collaboration with Vice-Chancellor Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen, Pro Vice-Chancellor Søren Frandsen, University Director Jørgen Jørgensen and other members of Aarhus management. We can learn from how Aarhus University has been organised since 2010, including how it has organised its library operations, in comparison with our own organisation. University Librarian at LU Jette Guldborg-Petersen gave a presentation of our library operations and Kristina Josefson presented our Track-It project.

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Lund University remains the most popular Swedish university for international students. It is great that so many international students want to study here.

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The latest vice-chancellor’s assembly was attended exclusively by women – see picture. Next week we will no doubt see a better gender balance…!

/Eva

A consultation paper on greater rights for doctoral students has been sent out by the Ministry for Education. The document proposes that doctoral students should be employed on studentships, insurance should increase their sense of security and doctoral students who fall ill or take parental leave should have greater rights. We welcome these proposals.
The vice-chancellor signed a decision in June 2011 to entirely abolish study grants for our doctoral students from 1 January 2013. This applies throughout third-cycle studies and we have thus gone a step further than the Government’s proposal. The Government proposes that those on a doctoral grant should be given a studentship within the first year of the four-year programme.
At LU, doctoral grants are being phased out during 2012. They will be replaced with doctoral studentships or scholarships from 2013. At LU we also took a decision a couple of years ago to improve the social safety net for doctoral students on scholarships.
Job security and good terms of employment are a must if we are to recruit and retain the best doctoral students. We will now also review how we could further improve the situation of our doctoral students on scholarships. They have a poor safety net while they are funded by scholarships, even with the insurance policies we take out.

Margot Wallström chaired our board meeting on 20 April and received a warm reception. Items on the agenda included appointing Eva Wiberg as pro vice-chancellor to succeed Ingalill Rahm Hallberg. In conjunction with the board meeting, Margot has also had a number of induction days and met many representatives of the faculties.
Read an interview with Margot Wallström and watch a film clip of her talking about her new post

We are looking forward to the Universitas 21 annual meeting, which will be held here in Lund on 7–11 May. The meeting will gather university management, researchers and students from the 15 member countries to discuss common challenges for the future.

The Planet Lund sustainability festival will be held on 12–26 May. For two weeks, Lund will show off its commitment to sustainable development. The festival is being organised by Utmaning hållbart Lund, a joint sustainable development platform for Lund University and Lund Municipality.
For more information, see the festival website

Batons are being handed over in the management group this week. Eva Wiberg will be taking over from Pro Vice-Chancellor Ingalill Rahm Hallberg. Eva Wiberg remains responsible for education matters as she has been as assistant vice-chancellor.
Nils Danielsen, professor at the Department of Experimental Medical Sciences and at the Neuronano Research Centre, will become the new assistant vice-chancellor and take over the portfolio Ingalill had as assistant vice-chancellor, with responsibility for leader, teacher and employee excellence.

Application statistics have come in and the number of applications to Lund University continues to rise. Applications for the autumn semester have risen by 12 per cent from 58 251 last year to 65 258 this year. The number of applicants who put Lund University as their first choice has also increased by 14 per cent on last year. This year, 29 518 people applied to Lund as their first choice compared with 25 842 last year. This puts Lund University in third place for number of applicants, both in total and for first choice applications. The University of Gothenburg received the most applications, followed by Stockholm. We are pleased at the increase in the number of applicants to Lund University and that there is high demand for our programmes and courses. The funding cap needs to be raised and we have requested an increase of almost 2 000 full-time equivalent students.
More information about applications on the Swedish Agency for Higher Education Services website